NUI Maynooth Summer School 'Making the Built Environment Work'

This event commenced on June 27th until July 2nd 2011 at NUI Maynooth. It is recognised by the RIAI (35 CPD credits) and by the ISSP (5 ECTS)

The aim of the Summer School is to facilitate learning across the following disciplines, architects, urban designers, planners and social scientists.

This acquired an inter-disciplinary approach to some of the current challenges within the 'broken environment'. It was an experiment to collaborate in an Interdisplinary way through Workshops and Fieldtrips.

Workshops facilitated this 'thinking outside the box' approach in the form of a new template, from reading the environment, one group analysed the town by observing dog walkers in Maynooth town.
One of the speakers acknowledged, that there is more cross-disciplinary working. I would recommend an interdisciplinary group working in practice perhaps even meeting the residents.

I was part of the Learning Landscape group which involved working with architects, social scientists, and planners in a unique way to read and present the landscape to our audience. I am a recent graduate and was open-minded to reading the Landscape. Some professionals couldn't decide whether 'their hats should be on or off' and in the end it was concluded best practice to 'take their hats off'.

Maynooth Summer School challenged us to think about 'localism' in a new way, as professionals we have a duty to know ourselves. Only then can we understand what other people need in relation to infrastructure provision.

The new template our group pushed home was the idea of subversive practice in the planning profession.
This follows the inate idea that the  'grass is always greener on the other side'.